daisy_seriesfandomcom-20200215-history
The Dream World: Can It Exist?
So if you're watching Fox, the idea of a Dream World has got you thinking; can this actually be possible? Sure. Anything is, right? Definitely the concept of two worlds working parallel with one another is a possibility, right? No, seriously. Give me a scientific explanation. Ok. Is our universe the only universe? A question that has stirred within the minds of man since the beginning of time. Heaven, hell, galaxies far, far, away, the Matrix, alternate realities and yes, now the Dream World. The quick answer is we don't really know as there is no evidential proof that something does exist beyond our universe but it is possible and here’s why: Before we can properly dissect the possibility of a Dream World existing, we need to know what a dream is. Dreams are a collection of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur usually involuntarily in our minds during certain stages of sleep. The scientific study of dreams is called oneirology. To even consider the concept that the Dream World exists, you would have to accept the idea that reality and fantasy are a state of mind. Does that make you crazy? Maybe. Does that make it real? Depends. It's like Fox says, "It's all in the mind but it's just as real as anything you've ever known." So basically, your mind makes it real. They just Matrixed you! Let’s get a better cultural understanding, shall we? The Mesopotamians believed that the soul, or some part of it, moves out from the body of the sleeping person and actually visits the places and persons the dreamer sees in their sleep. In Chinese history, people wrote of two vital aspects of the soul of which one is freed from the body during slumber to journey in a dream realm, while the other remained in the body, although this belief and dream interpretation had been questioned since early times, such as by the philosopher Wang Chong (27-97). The Indian text Upanishads, written between 900 and 500 BC, emphasize two meanings of dreams. The first says that dreams are merely expressions of inner desires. The second is the belief of the soul leaving the body and being guided until awakened. If we learned anything from the film, Inception, it's that your mind can't tell the difference from when it's dreaming and when it's awake because scientifically, your mind is always going, moving and thinking. Your mind doesn't sleep, your body does. So it is possible for one to confuse reality and fantasy at some point of severe exhaustion or just question life all together. Regarding philosophical realism, some philosophers have concluded that what we think of as the "real world" could be or is an illusion (an idea known as the skeptical hypothesis about ontology). This leads us to The Dream Argument; the postulation that the act of dreaming provides preliminary evidence that the senses we trust to distinguish reality from illusion should not be fully trusted, and therefore any state that is dependent on our senses should at the very least be carefully examined and rigorously tested to determine whether it is in fact reality. Dreaming provides a springboard for those who question whether our own reality may be an illusion. The ability of the mind to be tricked into believing a mentally generated world is the "real world" means at least one variety of simulated reality is a common. Those who argue that the world is not simulated must concede that the mind—at least the sleeping mind—is not itself an entirely reliable mechanism for attempting to differentiate reality from illusion. While people dream, they usually do not realize they are dreaming (if they do, it is called a lucid dream). This has led philosophers to wonder whether one could actually be dreaming constantly, instead of being in waking reality (or at least that one cannot be certain, at any given point in time, that one is not dreaming). "There is no spoon." Although mentally fantasy is a state of mind, there are still rules. Just because you believe there is no spoon doesn't actually mean, there is no spoon. Just because you believe you're dreaming, doesn't actually mean you're not awake. Reality has rules for example, gravity. Just like in the Matrix, you can't mix the rules up. The Dream World is a state of mind not a state of physicality. But can it be like in Fox? By traveling to the Dream World can we also take a part of our physical self there? Is it possible? This leads us to “The Many- Worlds Interpretation” which is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts the objective reality of the universal wavefunction and denies the actuality of wavefunction collapse. Many-worlds implies that all possible alternate histories and futures are real, each representing an actual "world" (or "universe"). In lay terms, the hypothesis states there is a very large—perhaps infinite —number of universes, and everything that could possibly have happened in our past, but did not, has occurred in the past of some other universe or universes. This would also conjure the idea of a Dream World as it would/could be an alternate past or future. Before many-worlds, reality had always been viewed as a single unfolding history. Many-worlds, however, views reality as a many-branched tree, wherein every possible quantum outcome is realized. Many-worlds reconciles the observation of non-deterministic events, such as random radioactive decay, with the fully deterministic equations of quantum physics. Provided the theory is linear with respect to the wavefunction, the exact form of the quantum dynamics modelled, be it the non-relativistic Schrödinger equation, relativistic quantum field theory or some form of quantum gravity or string theory, does not alter the validity of MWI since MWI is a metatheory applicable to all linear quantum theories, and there is no experimental evidence for any non-linearity of the wavefunction in physics. So, is the Dream World possible by all scientific accounts? Yes. It is proven that we dream and that our minds create images whether we're the author of those creations or something or someone else creates them for us to see. In that case, the Dream World is possible as our minds go somewhere when our body shuts down, however, that does not mean that the Dream World is a physical place. In fact, scientifically proven- it isn’t. There is no evidence to support the theory that one can travel from one place to another in an alternate reality. That doesn’t make it unreal, it makes it unproven making the Dream World a state of mind that does exist but not a physical place one can visit therefore making it existence questionable all together. As in the show, the Dream World is used as a metaphor for faith. Faith can not be proven, it's a belief system. Does one world serve as the mothership of all dreams? That has also has yet to be proven, however, everyone does have access to a Dream World and can take from their experiences there, as they wish. And there you have it, scientifically, the Dream World does and does not exist. It depends on you.